Turning funders into advocates, within what we could legally claim

Context

Trees That Count is a New Zealand conservation platform connecting people who fund native tree planting with the planters who do it. I was an in-house Product Designer there in 2023. This was a solo design effort that ran cross-functionally with a PM, the marketing manager, and developers.

The platform already had strong word-of-mouth growth. People liked telling others they'd funded trees. But the thing they could actually say was thin: "I funded X trees." That number didn't capture what the contribution meant, and it didn't give anyone else a reason to join in.

The problem

There was a communication barrier sitting right on top of the platform's best growth channel. Funders wanted to talk about their environmental contribution, but the only language available to them was a raw tree count. They understood they'd done something good; they couldn't articulate why it mattered in terms that would move their own networks.

That capped organic growth. Every funder who couldn't confidently describe their impact was a referral that didn't happen. So the design problem here wasn't conversion in the usual sense. It was advocacy: giving existing funders the tools and the language to bring other people in. That reframe, from "how do we convert" to "how do we equip our funders to be advocates," is what the whole project turned on.

My role

Solo designer on this, working cross-functionally. I led the design strategy, ran the investigation into what we could and couldn't claim, and designed the experience across the touchpoints involved. The PM, the marketing manager, and the developers were my collaborators; the legal and compliance review that governed every claim was a hard external constraint I had to design within, not something I controlled.

The call I'd point to as most mine was treating this as an advocacy problem rather than a conversion one, and sequencing the rollout so the riskiest, most coordination-heavy part (defensible impact claims) was proven on a small surface before expanding.

Approach

I started not with design but with a constraint question: what impact data could we actually extract from what we already held, and what were we legally allowed to say about it? Environmental impact claims are not free text you can market however you like. Overstate them and you expose the organisation. So before any of the experience work, I investigated the data we had and the boundaries on communicating it.

Then I rolled it out as a proof of concept first. I led with project pages as the test surface: translate the funding into meaningful, defensible impact and see how users responded. Once the team saw a positive response there, we expanded the same storytelling approach into the donation flow, showing live impact at the point of giving, and into the funder dashboard, showing cumulative impact over time. Proving it small first was deliberate, given how much cross-functional coordination and compliance review each claim carried.

The core design move was translation: turning an abstract tree-funding figure into environmental impact expressed in terms a funder could understand and repeat with confidence. Every one of those translated measures had to clear legal and compliance sign-off before it could appear.

Collaboration & method

The defining feature of this project was that every impact claim went through formal legal and compliance sign-off. That's unusual for a design project and it shaped everything. I couldn't design a metric, ship it, and iterate; each claim had to be both meaningful to a funder and legally defensible, and those two pressures don't naturally agree. A claim scientifically airtight enough for legal can be lifeless to a user; a claim vivid enough to share can overstate. Most of the real work was finding measures that satisfied both at once and getting them through review.

That meant heavy cross-functional coordination. I worked with the PM on scope and sequencing, with the marketing manager on how the impact language would carry beyond the product into comms, and with developers on building the touchpoints, all against the gating constraint of compliance approval. The one-month timeline was tight for that many dependencies, which is exactly why I sequenced it as proof-of-concept-then-expand rather than trying to land all three touchpoints at once.

Constraints & tradeoffs

• Every claim legally defensible. No impact measure shipped without formal compliance sign-off. Trade-off: slower, less creative freedom on the language, accepted because an overstated environmental claim is a real organisational risk, and a credible claim is also a more shareable one.
• Proof of concept before full rollout. Project pages first, then donation flow and dashboard. Trade-off: slower to full impact, accepted because it de-risked the coordination and let the team see evidence before committing the harder surfaces.
• Advocacy over conversion. I optimised for equipping existing funders to bring others in, rather than for a direct conversion metric. Trade-off: the payoff is more diffuse and harder to attribute cleanly, accepted because word-of-mouth was already the platform's strongest channel and this fed it directly.

What shipped

An impact-storytelling system across three touchpoints over roughly a month: project pages (the proof of concept), the donation flow (live impact shown at the point of giving), and the funder dashboard (cumulative impact over time). Each translated tree-funding into environmental impact measures that had cleared formal legal and compliance review, giving funders concrete, credible language to describe and share their contribution. The same measures then fed into marketing comms beyond the product.

Outcome

I want to be straight about the evidence here, because it's directional rather than hard. Preliminary data pointed to increased engagement on the funder dashboard and an uplift in average donation, helped by being able to use these impact measures across marketing comms. I don't have firm, measured figures to put a number on either, so I'm holding them as directional signals, not claims.

What I'm confident about is the qualitative result: the core communication problem was solved. Funders went from "I funded X trees" to being able to describe their environmental impact in specific, credible terms they were comfortable sharing. The system also cut down the manual impact-report requests the team had been fielding. The honest summary is that a fairly small change in how data was presented gave funders a meaningfully better advocacy tool, with early signals it was working and the harder ROI measurement left undone.

Reflection

The part I'd defend hardest is the reframe: seeing this as an advocacy problem, not a conversion one. The instinct on a growth brief is to chase conversion metrics. The more valuable move here was recognising that the platform's real engine was word-of-mouth and the bottleneck was that funders lacked the language to feed it, so design's job was to hand them that language.

What I'd do differently is obvious from the Outcome: get proper measurement in place before launch. The directional signals were encouraging but I can't point to a hard number, and for a project whose whole thesis is "better tools drive more advocacy," that measurement gap is the thing I'd close. The work was right; the proof of it is softer than I'd like, and that's on the setup, not the design.

What this proves

I do UX strategy, not just screens: I'll reframe a brief (conversion into advocacy) when the reframe is where the real value sits. I can design inside hard legal and compliance constraints, finding language that's both meaningful and defensible and getting it through formal sign-off, which is a rare thing to have navigated as a designer. And I'm honest about evidence: I'll tell you what's measured and what's directional rather than dress up a soft result.